Monday, February 6, 2017

This post outlines some of the differences between an Office 365 Group Modern Team Site and a plain old SharePoint Team Site as of February 7th 2017.

[Updated to match the GA announcement February 23rd 2017]

The gaps may or may not affect you, but from a document management perspective we keep hitting several of the differences in every single projects which often leads to falling back to a plain old Team Site.

As there has been talks of enrolling/upgrading plain old Team Sites into a modern site in a group, I hope the limitations will go away and align more in the future. At Puzzlepart we see the most important ones being able to programmatically configure up pages in a scalable way and having access to synchronized content types.

Functionality

Modern Team Site

SharePoint Team Site

Comment

Modern lists

Yes

Yes

Works in both types of site.

Modern libraries

Yes

Yes

Works in both types of site.

Modern pages

Yes

Yes

Works in both types of sites, but the modern team site has a different landing page not available in the old team site.

Embed maps/videos etc.

Yes(*)

Yes

For modern team sites you can only embed from the default white listed domains (YouTube, Vimeo, Office, Microsoft, Bing, Live, PowerBI, Sway, Docs, Stream), so no Google maps.

Top navigation

No

Yes

Modern team sites only have the Group navigation and entries to subsites (don't do it!), and no options today for custom links.

Content Types

Yes

Yes

You can create custom columns and content types in both types of sites.

Content Type HUB synchronization

Yes

Yes

Allows easy distribution of content types and columns to all sites.

Membership customization

You can customize any level of security

You can customize any level of security

Modern team sites have owners, and members from an AAD group. The AAD group can be given any rights you want. Public groups also have Everyone as contributor by default, these can now be given visitor access. Besides this, you can add people at any level you want, but this only yields for the team site, not other group assets like Planner.

Upload aspx files

No

Yes

This is needed if you want to configure the site programmatically upon creation to suit your business needs. For example have a customized modern page as the landing page, or add other information pages upon creation.

SPFx web parts

Yes

Yes

Being rolled out to everyone right now

Custom actions

Yes(*)

Yes

Modern team sites only support this via the App model, not direct custom actions. Custom actions do no work on modern pages.

Script embed

No

Yes

For modern team sites you can create a custom SPFx web part to support this.

Site property bag support

No

Yes

You cannot programmatically update the site property bag on a modern site, but in many cases you can work around this. This has traditionally been used to store site meta data.

Update 2017-02-14
I had someone ping me on Twitter saying you can do granular view/edit permissions going directly to _layouts/15/user.aspx on a modern team site and I know that's a possibility. Or do it programatically.

However, I think this is a bad bad bad bad bad idea. If you're a member of a group you are either in or out, and can work with all services in the Office 365 Group. Seeing the Group team site isolated does not make sense to me, and I tend to get really worked up in discussions around this (as happened this morning). If Office 365 Groups roll out a complete visitor/member option, then I'm all for it. For now I would go with what is visible directly in the UI - or use STS#0.

Update 2017-02-28
Microsoft decided to put a link to the user.aspx in the UI. Which means you can easily add/remove other AAD groups or people at will - like you did on a classic team site. You can however not split up the members from the Office 365 groups AAD group at will. That AAD group has to be given equal permissions. Of course, you can lower it, and give certain members more rights.

All of this reminds me when I taught power user courses for SharePoint 2010 - permissions gets muddy and complex pretty quick, with no control. Keep it as simple as you can, and you will slee better at night and support will love you. If you ever have a chance to chat me up at some event I'd be more than happy to discuss permissions around sites and groups :)